


between the motion and the act

by wreckageofstars



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Speculation, character study (??), post 2x29
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 16:47:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15586311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreckageofstars/pseuds/wreckageofstars
Summary: Caleb plans - and fails - to make his escape.





	between the motion and the act

 

For a few long hours, they wait in the gloom of early evening, eyes trained on the walls of the Sour Nest, the tension so thick and viscous it is almost something he could reach out and touch. Dark and shiny and slow, like his molasses.

The waiting is always worse than the doing.

But they have very little choice here, very little recourse, very little time. Very few friends, except for the ones they have picked up along the way. This is a slapdash plan, hanging on the edge of a very thin thread, unlikely to succeed, already he can think of a thousand ways it might go wrong, a thousand ways in which they all might die gruesomely, but –

Well. _Write what you know_.

“Hey.” Beauregard's voice is low, husky, not quite a whisper.

“ _Ja_?”

A beat of viscous silence. He can almost hear her thinking. Preemptively regretting. All of this has forced them into places they don't inhabit naturally. Forced them into saying things that might otherwise have never seen the light of day.

“I'm a light sleeper,” she says finally, grudgingly. Too rough to be a whisper, but too quiet to be anything else. “And you talk to yourself. A lot.”

His thoughts run in circles sometimes, if he doesn't say them out loud, but he keeps that to himself. Besides. He knows where this is going.

“And?”

He waits.

“You're not going to leave,” she breathes, and it's only half a question. His eyes linger on Nott to avoid her gaze, glued to Nila's side in an effort to conserve warmth. Dwarfed by her shadow. Her voice echoes in his head. _Wrong_. _Why?_

His breath stalls in his throat, but he's always been terribly good at lying to himself. Old habits are hard to break.

“I am not going to leave,” he says eventually, and even though she can't have expected anything else, he watches some of the tension leak from Beauregard's shoulders. “I've – come this far.”

“Good,” she says, her voice fragile and terrible. “If you had, before – if you _do_ , I'll –”

 _Miss you, hate you_. _Kill you_. He isn't sure. He's not sure she is either.

“Did you mean what you said before?” She swallows harshly. “About – about burning them in their sleep.”

“Write what you know,” he says again, too mildly, almost a reflex, bile rising in his throat in what's more of an afterthought. “I am – not good at much. I can't be in charge here. I can't keep any of you safe. But I can – I can do that. I _will_ do that.” The early moon gleams down on them sickeningly. “I owe him that much,” he says, more quietly.

She shakes her head. “Not sure he'd want you to.” _Mollymauk_ , she doesn't say. Haunting them like a spectre, like a shadow. “Go digging up the past to avenge him, or whatever.”

“He is not here to argue his case.”

The look she sends him is hilariously disapproving, coming from her. So much growth, on her part, in the scant hours since they lost him. Like she's expanded to fill the space he left, while Caleb has only sank further into the ground. Closer to everything he's buried.

“Don't worry about me, Beauregard,” he tells her, eyes trained on the distance. Hands and knees already shaking at the thought of what lies in wait for them, warring with an almost morbid curiosity. A competence that he refuses to admit is still there. “I am a coward, remember.” She shakes her head and goes back to watching the wall, lips pressed thinly. Knuckles white at her side.

He shoves his trembling hands into his pockets.

“Out of all of us, I don't think I will be striking the killing blow.”

 

#

 

But his luck, as always, is very strange and less than twenty-four hours later (even beaten, even bruised, he knows exactly how much time has passed, in fact), once they have all stumbled back to Shadycreek, found their way to the brothel, shoved healing potions down their captured friends' throats and stumbled in turn down to the bar, he finds himself pressed against the wall beside the entrance, ash at the back of his mouth, his hands free of soot because he has scrubbed them raw, heart pounding in his throat.

And his hands are shaking and uncharacteristically clean and his head is fuzzy and he would like to be as joyful as the rest of them, as inappropriately raucous at their victory, however bittersweet, but –

But he cannot shake the feeling that now might be his only chance to slip away unseen. Unnoticed. He's seen this through. He's done what he promised.

“There you are,” Nott says, cheerfully drunk but not completely intoxicated, winding her way clumsily through the door with a squeak of its hinges and a flash of music and fragile laughter that escapes with her. Everyone inside is either drinking and dancing or sleeping. Or – not sleeping, as the case may be, but Beau's business is her own, and he cares to know as little as possible. For all of their sakes.

“I thought you were with Jester,” he rasps, a trembling hand reaching out to touch her head fondly. “Is she alright?”

 _No_ , he thinks is probably the answer, _how could she be_ , but Nott's face gives away nothing. “She's sleeping now,” is all she says, smiling faintly at the touch of his hand, reaching into her impressive pockets. “Sit with me,” she says, unearthing a dusty-looking healing potion and passing it to him insistently.

“You should save this for the others,” he protests, a bit half-heartedly. He is dreadfully tired. Still bleeding, a little bit, actually. But Shakaste had left, and Jester, Fjord, Yasha – whatever spells left at Cadeuceus' disposal had seemed better suited to treat them first. Whatever potions. He can wait until the morning. He has waited this long.

“You've left bloodstains on the wall behind you,” Nott points out.

“Ah. Hmm.”

“So,” she takes his hand and places the potion in it. “I think probably no one will say anything if you take this. I bought it off the creepy inn-owner guy, and he said it was super old, but I checked it and it's – it's not poison. At least.”

“ _Ja_? Well. In that case, I suppose.” He slides down the wall and ignores the way Nott's eyes fix tiredly on the blood that trails behind him. “Down the hatch.” He uncorks it with his teeth and pours it down his throat. It tastes – stale, and a little bitter, but for a moment it washes away the taste of ash, warms his belly, banishes the cold sweat of shock that has been his companion for the last couple hours.

Nott slides down the wall beside him, hood falling down as she sits. “Better?”

“Yes. _Danke_.”

She picks at a nail, avoiding his gaze. “If I hadn't come and found you, would you have just stayed here and bled against the wall until the morning?”

Truthfully, maybe, but only because he had sort of forgotten that he was bleeding.

“I only came outside for a moment,” he lies. “To think.”

“Think about what?” She takes a gulp from that ridiculous flask. Tips it towards him, and takes another gulp when he declines. He knows that she knows that he is lying. But she is far too good, far too gentle, and so she doesn't mention it. “We won today, you know. Because of you.”

“I hid the entire time. Literally.”

“You were right where you needed to be when it counted,” she insists, eyes glassy but sincere. “You're better at this than you think you are.”

“That is – ” He fumbles. Sighs. “Do you ever wonder if maybe that is the crux of the problem here?”

Even in the evening gloom, his hands are red and painfully raw. For a time, he had been a bit uncertain as to which soot was real and which was imaginary. Better safe than sorry.

“You burnt him.”

“ _Ja_.”

Nott's face – crinkles, in that delightful way it does, when she is on the cusp of figuring something out. “Did it – did it feel good?”

His tongue catches on the edge of his teeth. “ _Very_ ,” he spits out, viscerally miserable. Tasting blood.

She scoots closer. Thinking, visibly. Following the thread back to where it starts. “You know,” she says, after a moment. Tiny green fingers clutch in the folds of his bloodstained coat. “You don't have to feel bad about that. About it feeling good.”

Bad and good. Things that people are, things that people do. And him, stuck somewhere miserably in between.

“I don't,” he says, lying through his teeth, probably, if that's what the sinking feeling in his gut is, sticky and sweet like tar. He can't place it, but it doesn't feel nice. Hasn't felt nice since he first tasted ash at the back of his throat again, flames throwing bloody shadows against the dungeon wall, burning flesh filling his nostrils. “He was – a very bad man, his people killed my cat, he killed – ” Blood again, at the back of his mouth. “He killed our friend,” he says. Softly, too quick, too late, and it feels like weakness. He hadn't said it then. Frumpkin's loss had been so fresh, so cutting, his only tether to the past that doesn't hurt, _his_ , and – and Beau's words from before, they'd cut through the burning and the smell and the blood and for just a moment he had thought – _do not stain his memory with this_. And so he hadn't. “And he hurt the others. He deserved to burn.”

“Of course,” Nott says, warm and reassuring, and it is – it is too easy, all of it. Too easy to make what he's done into something good, when before it had been bad. When before that it had been good. How is he ever to know, this way? How is he ever to know what the right thing is, when it shifts at every turn, when it depends on the day? When a stroke of fate can make all the difference? How is he ever supposed to know if what he wants is right and good?

He is a bad person that has done good things. A good person that has done bad things. Just a person that has done things that are unforgiveable, a person that has done things that are kind, and so – what kind of a person does that make him?

Molly had not cared about what they'd done. Only about who they were. Their new friend seems not to care about who they are, but only about what they do. Being, doing. He has read a thousand books and he cannot say which comes first. And in the meantime, he is trapped in a kind of purgatory, a monster surrounded by people telling him that he is not. A man doing monstrous things, a monster doing righteous things. It must hinge on that, he thinks, hunching over slowly, hands creeping up to pull at his hair. The moment he stops thinking of himself as a monster is likely the moment that he has become one again. How much of what is inside of him can be allowed out before that line is crossed?

 _The problem_ , he thinks, even as Nott's smaller hand reaches up for his own, tries to pry his hands open before he tears the hair out of his scalp. _The problem is that I think I would do it_. Cross that line for them. For Nott.

“Caleb,” she whispers, in that voice he hates, far too gentle, far too sad, and he bites his tongue and loosens his grip because he knows that will stop it. The burning in his scalp recedes. For a moment he just breathes, still hunched over, hands useless in his lap. Raucous laughter, faint music, trickle in from the door, spilling out with the faint light.

“This time,” Nott ventures, tentative but not afraid of him, never afraid of him, bless her. “When you burned him alive. You didn't go away. You stayed here.”

“It gets easier every time,” he says almost bitterly, glaring distantly into his reddened hands, imagining them charred and blackened with soot. Feeling bile crawl up the back of his throat, the strangling encroach of an anxiety that never fades.

“No,” she says simply, burying herself more determinedly into his side. “I don't think it does.” Her head twists to look up at him, sallow gaze catching golden in the light from inside the brothel. “You might be able to become invisible, Caleb. But I can always see you.”

 _Then keep watching_ , he thinks to beg, fear wound in his stomach like a tightly coiled spring, cold sweat gathering at his temple. Something dark and old and simmering unearthed inside of him like old dirt, like soot and ash, too terrible to touch. Too powerful to bury again, now that it's been dug up.

But he's asked too much of her already. Beauregard is watching. For now, that will have to be enough.

Nott's eyes, gleaming in the dimness, are patient as he buffers. But there's a fragility lurking there that he sees only rarely, some potent mixture of relief and regret. Grief. She loves them, and he loves her, and so he supposes that he loves them too. She loves them and she almost lost them. Did lose one of them. And all of it is good and bad, it is and was done, exists as a state and an action, and it feels like – nothing. Nothing except for tar in his stomach and a sickness at the back of his throat, waiting to become something.

But for her it is something. For her it is right now, for her it has already become something that hurts and he should – say something. Say something to make it less. She deserves something that will make it less. But no words that might comfort come to his mouth. They tangle and lose their thread somewhere between his brain and his tongue, and so he scrubs a tired hand down his face and presses a kiss to her head instead. Payback, for earlier.

“Things will be okay now,” she mumbles into his chest, nose sticking into his ribcage. Burying herself reassuringly in that spot that she likes best, ignoring his muffled grunt of pain. “Maybe – maybe not better than they were before. But we'll be alright.”

She's right. They are all safe now.

He could leave.

He could do it. Send Nott to bed, tuck her back in with Jester, fragile but alive, knowing that she is safe, knowing that she is loved. Take off into the night and spend the rest of his days lurking in the shadows. Safer for him. Safer for everyone, probably. Whatever they all are to each other, whatever he has become a part of, he knows, deep down, that he does not deserve it. That he will likely ruin it all, just like he ruined everything else. His goals are not compatible with theirs. He doesn't even know if they are right and good anymore, and this group – they might not be good people, all of them. But they do good things. Right things. They leave places better than how they found them, now. Mollymauk's ghost has ensured that much.

He should leave. He is a monster, and he should leave.

“In the morning,” he says into Nott's hair, smelling ash and blood and liquor. “I will bring back my cat.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Unfortunately, the hobo wizard is my favourite.
> 
> Title paraphrased badly from Eliot's The Hollow Men because it's wonderfully pretentious and one of my favourites, and the phrase I borrowed in itself probably takes from a wonderful bit from Julius Caesar II (i). Which I think sort of works here but also might not, because I'm. Not a Shakespeare scholar. Anyway, how about that live show huh! That was amazing! Guest stars! Nefertiti was there! They rescued their friends! They raised some important philosophical questions about the nature of being and goodness! 
> 
> I'm consistently blown away by the scope of this show, guys, and super excited for whatever is coming up next. I'm sure it'll be a bit different from what I've delved into here, but I thought it was an interesting stepping off point, so? Speculation. That's what fic is for, right? Anyway, this was super quick and it's not well edited but I hope you enjoyed! Thank you for reading! As always, please let me know what you thought! You can find me on tumblr @sunshinedaysforever if you'd like to yell with me some more.
> 
> \- W


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